“
Let me tell you this: nothing makes a broken woman feel more beautiful than to have a man swoop in and push her up against a wall to tell her how much better she is than that. To kiss her, I mean really kiss her, regardless of what she might think about that. You know why nice guys finish last? It’s because when a guy named Bayne leaves you for no good reason and you feel like you’ve been reduced to nothing, my nice guy won’t come over and say the things I really need to hear to understand that he loves me, I mean really loves me. Us ladies, we know we’re beautiful, we know we’re intelligent, we know we’re worth it and we’ll find “him” someday. What we really need to hear and more importantly feel (at that moment — from you, the nice guy)) is that we’re sexy, that our inner organs that separate us from you guys are actually worth something. That we’re so beautiful that you can’t and don’t care whether or not that kiss you’ve so desperately wanted to plant on us is going to ruin our friendship. We want you, the nice guy, to rebel against your rules and just do what feels right. Take control of the situation and tell us that this is fucking it, you are in love with me. You are so in love with me that you are so unbelievably ready to ruin our friendship for a chance at love. That you are willing to pick up that bat and attempt to hit the ball out of the fucking stadium. Because either you strike out or you hit a home run. No one wants to sit in the dugout. But you don’t. You sit in the dugout and you tell us that we’re pretty, and not fat. That we’re worth it. And that Bayne is just stupid and doesn’t know what he’s missing. You’re too nice. You’re too good of a friend. Be a man. Make the call. Try your best to force us to love you. Because in the end, you’re right. Nice guys do finish last. So how about you buck up and become something else. Because otherwise you’re going to lose us, you’re going to lose me.
Nice guys finish last because they’re pussies.
”Tales from the Tenderloin: this is fucking it, you are in love with me
[It’s just going to go said that advice is an impossible sort of speech act because of the langue/parole; freedom/necessity; universal/particular sorts of dichotomy. But—] It’s like every week there’s some sort of provocative post on women/men discursive practices and for some reason maybe because I never watched Sex in the City, I always find them really interesting.
I tend to subscribe to the T.I./Rihanna “Live your life (oh) / Ain’t got no time for the haters” type of personal philosophy. That the particular genius of people who are happy and good is that they put themselves in contexts where their actions are isomorphic with the goals, desires, and goods of the group; that particularly emotionally adept people—like good dressers—know when to break the rules.
I think the words above are personal (ie, have their own particular, not-fully-known context) but applicable more widely and they describe a set of actions not so jaded and reprobate as never to be useful or right. The most important part is that so-called nice guys (like, I guess, the lemmatically posited bad guys) tend to follow a fairly unchanging set of rules of behavior, and that it is important to know when to deviate from those rules.
Of course, it is axiomatic to treat people as ends/beings whose being is at issue/as you want to be treated yourself/a real person, but from that axiom the whole possibility of human interaction could reasonably said to follow. It’s important to have the humor, audacity, and joie de vivre necessary for taking a calculated risk, putting yourself out there, as it were. At root, empathy isn’t empathy if it’s just projection. You have to let yourself be felt, as well, because empathy as a human practice is a two-way street. So I can well sympathize with the above and with people who find it detestable.
